The State of Search & Social – #RIMC13

A great intro from Bas at the Reykjavik Internet Marketing Conference to the ‘State of Search & Social’ track. Ever the historian – Bas states that the first guy that ever got social right was Jesus… then one of his followers unfollowed him…

Starting with the general idea of Search. In times before a great many modern things existed, if you wanted to know something, you would go to the most knowledgeable person in the town and ask them answers – both Search AND Social.

Next came the library where you would climb to the top of the stairs to get to the book you wanted – search.

Over time, we eventually come to the Search Bar – where we can now can search the entire world.

Search has been around for a long time and will be around for a long time in a different way – the next thing is Google glass – the future of social, the future for search – it’s going to be creepy search – but it’s still search.

How is Search Changing?

Google is cleaning up so they can give us better search

Social is going to stay around and it’s relatively new

Graph search – you can find people working anywhere that like guns like porn like Obama

Google Plus is not a social network it’s an identity machine

Twitter – how is that going to impact what we do

We’ve come a long way from the Roman era to now and there is so much going on – how are we going to find the right angles?

There were 5 speakers involved in this track, the Twitter session was so packed full of info, that we have split the live blogs – the second part of this session coming later on today.

The way that we think about twitter as an information network – connect with things you’r passionate about. Using the example of the most re-tweeted tweet of all time – there have been over a million favourites or retweets for Obama.

There are also popular subversive tweets – for example the lead tweet on the lance Armstrong case was a joke about the situation:

Twitter has 200m users and seeing strong growth. There are 400m tweets a day. There has been an increase of smartphones – 60% of all users access Twitter on the mobile. Twitter has become an information network rather than a social network. Twitter is a chatroom and hashtags are the channel.

Twitter is the shortest distance between you and what interests you [@] most

Tone of Voice

Getting the tone right is incredigly important – a lot of the subversive tweets have humour running through them – brands don’t have to adopt a humourous tone – there are a number of different options that a Twitter account can adopt – they can’t seek to do everything – this is very much inspired by a piece of work seen by an artist

Want a website? – Good cheap fast – choose 2

Want to build your brand on Twitter – Fun – help – info – choose where you want to sit

Examples:

Samsung Twitter handle – not funny or entertaining they fulfil need and help – they did a live stream – they repeated that live stream – like a press ad

One of the best users of Twitter in the UK – O2 one of the challenges was that the network went down in one day as a result they got a lot of rude tweets from consumers – how did they respond? With humour

What happenned? – The sentiment towards the brand at that time increased

The average O2 customers service rating is 65 out of 100 – anyone exposed to their work on twitter is mid 70s so that’s the difference between a contract reneawal and a migration to another provider

Twitter and TV

There are a huge amount of users that Tweet during TV shows – these tweets are – unfiltered – unmoderated. People love tweeting alongside things they are watching

95% online on twitter

60% while watching TV

40% of all twitter traffic is about TV

In the USA shows targeting young audiences 4% increase in tweets leads to a 1% increase in sign ups

Drama shows – no tweets

Music Shows/ News shows – tweets all the way through

Ad breaks – tweets massively surge – they only start tweeting when there is an interruption – consequence of that is the programme will start trending on Twitter – people are seeing on Twitter that the programme is trending then people turn over to watch it

Jackie Hole is an Award Winning Search Marketing consultant specialising in Paid Search, Conversion Improvement and Organic Search / SEO for the USA, Canada and European markets. Starting out in Multimedia & Interface Design, Jackie has over 15 years experience in online marketing and was recently awarded European Search Personality of the Year. Jackie is Company Director of 22M